Quote of the Day

"People often have this idea that money is what is preventing them from doing their dreams. That's very rarely the case. It usually has to do with fear: fear of failure, fear of what people will think. You can go awful far without many resources on the low financial road. In fact, you actually learn more that way. If you have a choice, take the cheap route, always. "

Kevin Kelly

http://www.kk.org/kk/

Kevin Kelly's been one of my favorite writers for a while, he was at Wired for a long time, and was involved with The Whole Earth Catalog/Review mob, too.

A great futurist and alternative thinker. We need a lot more of them.

Today I hid in my shop, finally getting back to building and fixing guitars after a long break brought on by a flood of water, a huge garden and a more than a little fucked up world news overload funk.

It feels good to make sawdust again.

Hot Truck, Long Drive

A few things I thought about or reflected upon today, while driving:

My sweetie rocks, big time, even when she's overheated and nearly silent.

Inflatable queen size air mattresess lose air when you have two large mammals sleeping on them. And they suck even before they lose air.

Josh Munter builds kick ass guitars.

The older I get, driving for 6 hours with no air in the car sucks.

Thrift stores in Northern Wisconsin not called Goodwill are a much better deal than they are in Madsion.

Goodwill sucks no matter where you go, and the evil corparate mentality behind their mission makes the whole thing seem freakishly ruthless.

McDonald's iced coffee is not good, but can keep you awake.

There are about one third as many misquitos in northern Wisconsin than there are down here.

My tomato plants are starting to produce, big time.

Eating roasted fresh baby potatoes and a garden salad made from basil, tomatoes and garlic and olive oil, along with fresh picked sweet corn and Kori's homeade bread with Bess while watching the Futurama movie "Bender's Big Score" is a very fine way to spend a night after too much driving.

And, my little 1992 Toyota Truck got 30 MPG today.

Life is good, today, anyway.

More Making BBQ sauce

Mom's still going strong at 81, still cooking for a lot of folks.

She spent 50 years being a cook, thirty at a huge summer camp, a number of years in a few fancy pants hotels and ran a few restaurants with my short attention span father.

She knows how to knock out three meals a day for hundreds of folks making ingredients from scratch, and has a heart bigger than Northern Ontario.

I've been canning and putting up conserves and jam, this was my first BBQ sauce.

Few things taste as good as fruit and jam and pickles you make yourself. Being in a town with a Farmer's Market like ours is not a small thing.

But I still hate with a passion more bright than a thousand supernovas those damn eight wheeled strollers that self entitled yuppie scum use to push their spoiled brats around the market on the square.

Making BBQ Sauce With My Mother

Last week I went north, to the cute, quaint, lovely little shithole town I was stuck in when I went to what really was "high" school.

I spent most of my last three years bored, miserable and stoned in that tiny little school, one of thirty two who started senior year and 26 who actually cared enough to graduate.

Now, 33 years later, nearly everybody I went to school with has either fled, become dead from logging and drunk driving mayhem, or a catholic.

I thank god every day I'm no longer a believer in that whole suckitude that organized church life brings. I do however, enjoy the thrift stores run by mean, bored, petty little women who would hate my guts if they knew about my shocking lifestyle and disgusting habits.

I am still a dirty hippie, although they mess with you less when your fifty than they did when you were 15.

I hated a lot about Three Lakes then, still don't care for it now.

It's full of thugs and rednecks and retired swine who hate anybody not

white, straight and a dullard.

It's a great place to move to if you want to die old, and bitching about things.

I prefer Madison. People up north say Madison is a bubble outside reality.

I think at least bubbles rise up to the top of things instead of staying inbred, obtuse and bellicose. Not that most of the people living in my mom's town would even know what those last two words mean.

But I digress. My main reason for going up was to see mom, who lives across the street from the school I went to, a block from where her mother spent the last decade of her life.

Mom's a damn fine cook. She and I made a gallon of BBQ sauce, which we canned. Here's some photos of the process.

I made mine with lots more hot pepper, added jalapenos and a few more cloves and vinegar, but it's the same basic recipe, catsup, sugar, vinegar, spices, peppers and liquid smoke.

It turned out damn fine.

The Garden, July 21st 2008

The big flood in May didn't do any long term damage to the garden, that's for sure. It's gone berserk, with the hot days and warm nights bringing in tons of peppers, tomatoes and chard and summer squash.

It's so fertile that there are tomato and squash growing out of the side of my black plastic compost barrel.

Now if the damn skeeters weren't so thick, I'd be out there pulling weeds.

The Japanese beetles are back, though, munching on the hops and beans again. Damn alien invaders are now here for good.

We've been canning and putting up fruits and veggies like crazy.

Last week I picked a gallon and a half of tart cherries off a pal's trees, and we made fruit conserve, a pectin free fruit spread with walnuts, cranberries, cherries and pineapple, and another two batches of rhubarb conserve, using apricots, more pineapple and rhubarb and golden raisins.

We also hot packed eight or so pounds of green beans with jalapenos, and made two kinds of mulberry jam with blackberries, and a few other kinds of mixed fruit jam.

I like canning food and having locally grown sources for the ingredients, few things taste as good in the dead of winter than homemade jam with homemade bread, and Kori's turned into an amazing bread maker.

Last night we had our freak tribe real family Sunday dinner, and we ate beans and zucchini, garlic and onions from the garden, and made flaming cherries jubilee served over frozen yogurt with the cherries from Pam's trees.

Life is good, even with the speeding train of peak oil induced economic mayhem coming at us.

Daddy Complex make em' stupid

So, I'm reading the news, watching the blogs, and I'm noticing that almost all the reporters and barking heads are being just as stupid as they were when Bush was running, maybe more so about how wonderful that cranky retread of Bush the Younger McCain is.

It makes my head hurt. He says things that make no sense, and every time somebody gets in a question he can't handle, the media leap to defend him.

Just like they did when Bush ran. Maybe even more.

There must be something about the mainstream media that just loves a daddy figure, even if the rest of the country is ready for a real adult to run the country.

McCain did serve his country in the war. He did get shot down, tortured, locked in a hole and saw what must be the thing most like hell on earth you can live through.

But it also is the sort of thing that makes you barking mad, and fucks you up for life, from his damaged shoulder to his giant anger.

When a four star retired General like Wesley Clark can't point out that getting your ass shot out of the sky and then being stuck in a hole doesn't make you qualified to sit at the desk with the big red nuke button, and gets swiftboated for it, you know things are getting stupid.

I think I'd like somebody in that office who's not still fighting the wars of the last century, and somebody who can at least not look like a grinning skeleton being run by a puppeteer, somebody who will notice that things are going to shit in a whole different way in this new century.

And I also think Obama's going to be another Bill Clinton, looking out for just a few more people than the rethuglicans.

So, take your pick, the handsome black guy who won't keep fucking you in the same old way, and offers a reach around, or the angry old white man who should be in a retirement home and in therapy for big lying and anger management issues who's going to keep up the BushCo method of lube free reaming.

I think I'm gonna go barf.

On second thought, I did that after the pig roast Sunday when I got food poisoning. Never mind.

And here's another monkey photo, because I like them. Time to go pick beans and chard.

Thought of the evening:

Thought of the day: Watching your neighbors pull a whole pig out of a hot hole in the ground sure reminds you of how much a pig looks like a fat human.
And, the manly young men did not cook it enough in the pit. I am popular tonight, because we have a giant gas grill, and they're using it next door to finish the pig. And because we keep playing rude music like warped minstrels in an tacky italian restaraunt, walking from clot to clot of humans playing rude songs. The crowd really loves songs like "liquor and whores" from the Trailer Park Boys show. I'm amazed at what bad taste my new bandmate Micheal can pull out for drunks.


Liquor and whores
Liquor and whores
Cigarettes and dope
and mustard and bologna
andLiquor and whores
I went down Drinkin' '
at the Legion
I met a girl she was nice
She was pretty and pleasing
She said "Hey boyWe should do some marrying"
I said sure but before we do
There's something you should know
I like Liquor and whores
Liquor and whores
Cigarettes and dope and mustard and bologna
andLiquor and whores...

Objects in the mirror

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be one of my pals for a day. To see the world with their eyes, see how I and all my strange pals move through it with a different sensibility, to see how they might see me, to understand what they like about being my friend.

Then I start to think of all the ways I think I am, compared to all the ways people think I am, and I think about running screaming away from the whole idea.

Alexander Pushkin once said, "better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths". I think I understand that.

Maybe part of it's just growing into being a round faced invisible middle aged woman, but the older I get, the freakier it seems to think about how others see us moving through the world.

I know I'm fuckin' charming, well built, dramatic and darkly enigmatic as well as being a hardcore genius. But I doubt the rest of the world sees me that way. So I am glad I can't see myself through the eyes of other people.

Telepathy would be a terrible gift, hearing things you don't need to know, like how often people would think of scratching their butthole, how much they think about sex they'll never have, and how stupid and boring the thoughts most of the human race think.

And on another note:

Happy "fuck you King George, we're outta your empire, and you can go piss up a rope along with your Parliament, and then hang yourself with it" weekend. Odd to think we have our own King George now, who locks up people without due process in his own Tower of London in Cuba, a place we embargo because it's not a democracy.

I have been thinking of the irony of using a base in Cuba to keep people locked up without recourse since we did it.

But I digress. I'm going next door now, so I am egressing too, to the party our neighbors are having, where a whole pig was roasted, to drink beer and play some music and masticate dead porcine mammals.

Quote of the Day: HG Wells

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race,"

H. G. Wells.

I got six of them, three off the curb. I may ride slow and not too far, but there's a beauty in crusing along on a giant beach cruiser converted to an oversized stingray on a cool summer night.

Makes you feel like you're not an old cranky fart ranting about things for a while.

More Washington Island Photos

The beach at the end of the campground did not suck.

I watched the scariest looking sunset ever there. The sun was bigger than I've ever seen it as it set, and more than once I thought about how it looked like it could go into a red giant phase.

Then I thought, if things did end, I'd be in about the best place one could ask for.

This poor crab was somebody's dinner. There were lots of signs of crab carnage, those gulls were hungry, and there were a lot of them.

Monkey lookin' rock.

We detoured off the road on the way back through the hell that is Door County tourist land to a little place called Rowley Bay, hoping to find the bakery they threatend was there.

They lied! But on the way I saw this little cemetary, and this statue. No name or markings to say who was laid to rest there, just a fine chunk of angel on top of the grave. Pretty classy.

We had a pretty good weekend, but I felt sort of odd, like somebody slipped me a low dose of thorazine. A savage torpor, a relentless slothfull feeling grabbed me a lot of the time.

But we got a lot of sun, I got to ride bikes around the Island, and the company was pretty damn cool. Ellyn has some seriously cool folks there to hang with, I can see why she loves two weeks of not much to do.

It drove me a little nuts, though. I'm already a slacker, deeply in touch with my inner Big Lebowski.

It also felt pretty wierd to stay at a resort. I worked at one, my parent's gig at the summer camp for 20 plus years made me more used to being the staff at a joint like the one we stayed at. I felt like I should have been running trail rides on horses or working in the kitchen or painting the cottages.

We at Hint of Dementia will be returning to our unreasonable rants about humanity next. Sorry for the intrusion of good taste and the lack of swear words, it must fucking suck to read such a nice post.

My Weekend on Washington Island, The Slacker zone

Rajani, Elias, Ellyn and Kori, on the tiny front porch of the cabin that Ellyn was kind enough to share with us.

I embrace my sloth demon, and read half the weekend, all bad fantasy and science fiction. Damn, I'm starting to look my age. These things happen.

Kori and Ellyn, aka elly for two weeks, on the bench in front of the bay.

I walked around the beach picking up rocks, looking at where the dents and shapes would make faces, then took a few sharpie markers and drew these guys. I did this for about three hours, then put them back on the beach. I wonder if anybody will notice them down there in the rocks before they wash off. Not that it matters, it was a fun way to fill a few hours in the sun.

This rock reminded me of "the scream"

Another Reason To Hate People WIth Kids

I have decided that having babies makes people complete self involved, tight assed, short sighted and narrow minded pretentious fucking morons.

No One Is Safe From This Madness.

I'm surprised concerned parents haven't passed a law that a baby's eyes have to be sheilded from seeing the birth canal they come through, because it's pornographic.

I wonder when they'll pass laws saying you can't carry your baby unless it's wrapped in portable airbags.

Today, an underling from the Madison School District came over to our house to tell me that the principal has had complaints from parents about the nude mannikin with the alien head on it in my front window.

Somehow it's disturbing for the self entitled swine who park in front of my house with their fucking exhaust spewing engines waiting for their fat little waddlers to come out and get in big ugly cars to see an armless torso that doesn't have clothes on it.

The same fucks who are destroying their kids future by spewing carbon instead of walking, by feeding them a diet of corn syrup and refined flour, who let them sit in front of the idiot box playing games or watching dreck on TV so they can get early blood pressure problems and diabetes.

The same fucks who think the only thing that matters is the children they drop out of their bodies without a second thought, who can't be bothered to actually think about what they're doing long enough to get out of the fucking car and feel, smell and see the world by walking or biking.

I swear,the human race is a greedy, stupid, narrow minded bunch of mentally deficient goldfish brained jackasses who run from the idea of owning who and what they do and the consequences of those actions, and are clueless as to what a gift this life is that they're pissing away.

And what's up with the fucking school system? They can't just have the principal come over across the parking lot and talk to me, the next door neighbor, but instead have to have some flack drive around town and be hatchet person?

School's not even in session.

This country is involved in two bloody wars of agression, starting a long slide into another great depression, have weird and ugly weather starting to kick asses and take names, have a President who would piss on the Constitiuion after he wiped his ass it flaunting his powers and flipping the bird to everybody, and there are people complaining about an armless white plastic mannikin torso?

I'm glad I'm going out of town for the weekend, I need to get the fuck away from all the morons here and hang out with my dirty fucking hippie pals.

And to all my pals who are pregnant, or freshly afflicted with kids, don't think for a fucking moment you're getting any slack when you get the "think of the children" stupids on.

You, your spouse and your children are not fucking special snowflakes.

You're the same decaying organic matter the rest of us are, regardless of how entitled you feel to be mono subject about your kids, your right to drive them everywhere, and your need to push a fucking sport utility size stroller around the farmer's market at a snail's pace.

Have a nice day, all of you, even you mono subject boring ass child rearing fuckwads.

Baby Odin Smiles

The child of my pals Heidi and Caleb.

They may not see him quite the way I do.

It's summer. The bugs are finally here. My shop is finally dried out, my garden has come back to life, and Janel, Ellyn, and Bess are gone for weeks.

Seems sort of empty in town this week.

I had a good mad going all day about a bunch of shit, from the child birth induced stupidity of my pals with kids to the massive stupidity that our fucked up country is swimming in when it talks about pumping our way out of an energy crisis, but a strong drink of rum and darkness falling has taken the edge off.
So I worked on this beautiful baby shot instead.

nuff' said.

My Loud Band Packs It In.

As of last night, my electric band, The Sigourney Weavers, is on an extended break.

I think we're done. We agreed to check in in September, but the freakish and fun beast we made just can't get rolling with the other commitments others in the band have.

It makes me sad, because I found a lot of spastic monkey brained joy playing when we did. It got out on the edge in a fine way that no other musical arrangement any of us are in matches.

A band needs to practice more than every other week to gel into something with momentum, and we haven't been able to hit that mark.

Maybe we'll be back, in some different incarnation, but usually folks move on to other things.

I'd still love to do another Halloween Party at the former Wonder's Pub, but that seems like a long shot.

Bands are funny things. Sometimes they blow apart, sometimes they just melt away when nobody's looking. But when they work, they're worth every bit of shit one has to wade through.

Sure has been an fucked up week. I feel like loading up a backpack and walking up to Lake Superior and staying there till it snows.

Instead, I'll go try and dry out my shop and basment before it rains again.

Empty breadbaskets = No Slack

Better hope the grain crops don't get fucked by global warming.

Because we go no reserves if the shit hits the fan.
I swear, every year we get more people and more stupid about reality in this world.
I am getting sick of the mantra
Everything's fine! Don't worry!

Yeah, right. But don't expect any help if things get weird, because all that tax money you give to Uncle Sam needs to be spent on bombs and oil company subsidies. Government help in a disaster has gone the way of government cheese and food support. Gone, baby, gone.
I keep a fifteen pound sack o' beans around, as well as a few month's staples and freezer food because sooner or later, something's going to break, and I hate being hungry. Not enough to do more than delay some uncomfortableness, but enough to delude my self and stave off some misery.
Miss a few meals and you get cranky. Miss eight or nine and you'll kill for a hot dog. Most people never consider that.
Happy tuesday!

http://fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/health/food/news.php?q=1212803067

According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are only 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be only 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned Matlack. “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief. Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. The o°©nly thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat which is about enough wheat to make 1⁄2 of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.”

Underwater Suckitude

There's four inches of standing water in my workshop.

My garden is underwater.

The weather is doing the same erratic flooding and heavy rain it did last year, but worse.

I really don't want to think about how much damage I am going to have to clean up and remove and live with.

And I just spent a month gardening and weeding and planting. I sure hope my garden drains out before the big storms get here again, as early as mid week.

I think I want to go get drunk. Bleeech.

Vegetable Flower Porn

The Zuchini flower is a beauty. I find it amusing that it also grows into something that is bigger than an elephant schlong when you forget to pick them.

My garden's waterlogged. Huge downpours, tornado warnings, flood watches.

Bleech. I hope this summer isn't as frelled up at last summer when it comes to stupid large amounts of rain.

Today I planted another raised bed at somebody else's house. My campaign of agricultural agression continues. Seven more tomato plants, another hundred or so onions.

Sulu and his best man, Checkov

Reading this made me smile.

Pretty cool, although most folks under thirty don't remember the original Star Trek. I was glued to the TV every friday night from 1966 to 1968, falling in love with Science FIction in fourth or fifth grade, and have been addicted to the genre ever since.

It's funny, somebody writes some touch feely romance novel dressed up as important modern fiction, people get all woogly and snooty about it, but look down on Science Fiction because it's not serious enough.

I'll take a good SF novel any day over something pushed by Oprah's book club or The New York Times. We live in a world where Science Fiction can barely keep up with science, and most folks just plod along ignoring it.

Anyway:

"As previously reported, George Takei will wed his longtime partner in September - and has chosen his Star Trek co-star Walter Koenig as his best man. The 71-year-old star - known for his role as Sulu in the 1960s sci-fi series - will wed partner Brad Altman this summer, after California state authorities lifted the ban on same-sex marriage last month . Takei will marry his partner of 20 years on September 14th and has invited his former castmates to the ceremony. He tells People.com, “The best man is my colleague from Star Trek, Walter Koenig, who played Chekov, and the matron of honour is Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura). And Leonard Nimoy and his wife Susan are on the (guest) list.”
Takei hopes the ceremony will be more romantic than his proposal. He explains, “We knew that the Supreme Court was going to be coming down with their ruling. (We’d heard) that it was probably going to be positive. So I was planning on asking Brad to get married. “We were at home in the kitchen and we had the TV going, and when the word came down suddenly Brad got on his knees in front of me. And I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘George, will you marry me?’ I said ‘Yes. You beat me to it. I meant to ask you.’”

Vegetable porn

I don't even know if I like swiss chard.

But it sure is pretty in my garden, and my roomate Kate eats it.

But she eats Kale, too, and that stuff is like eating a green brillo pad, no matter how much butter and garlic you put on it, it still sucks.

Last night's drenching thunderstorm made my garden smile.

But the next week of rain may make it rot.

I hope all the local farmers got their seeds in before now.

Playing Until Your Fingers Sieze Up

My old musical Pal Jim, and Tom, who was one third of my first band.
The fab MF7 and me at the Market

I played last weekend for hours and hours. At least three hours at the Farmer's Market on the Square in the morning on Saturday with Mikey and his manfolks, then on Sunday sweetie and I went over to the green and distant land known as Westby, about two hours due west of here in what's called the driftless area, where the glaciers did not plow everything into a pancake of farmland like it did in a big chunk of central Wisconsin.

It's a neat area, great rolling hills and lots of hippie organic farmers and artists live out there.

Too many bluegrass bands, too, but I'm not going to bludgeon that reeking, dead maggot filled horse passing as an excuse for a musical genre today.

It was fun playing with Jim. I haven't seen him since he swapped out his Catholic Priest collar for a wedding ring. We played a lot of old folk music, something I don't usually do. He kept all his hair, too, but somewhere he lost the color in it.

Tom and I played for another three hours after Jim split for that toxic wasteland that is DePere and Green Bay. I hate the Fox Valley, but he seems happy living in a thriving hotbed of simple minded bible thumping Bush loving idiots.

Tom and I played everything we ever did and a bunch of new stuff. We still play a few times a year when he comes down to Madison, and pick it up right where we left it. I loved our old duo/trio.

It's a little sad sometimes though, because our third member, Jim fell back into a bottle and sort of vanished. Last I heard he'd gotten his third or forth drunk driving ticket and had moved to Japan. I really miss his bass lines and his creative spark, or at least when he was sober.

Dirt calls, weeds need pulling. My Swiss chard is begging me to model nude, I think I'll go shoot some more plant porn.

MF 7!

Mike, Mr. Fry and Jonathan, the drummer man.

Mikey is one of my shop rats. He's building an acoustic guitar while his wife builds Luna, that developing human parasite in her torso.

His band, for reasons that must be mysterious to most, is called the MF7, even though there's only three people in it.

He writes funky songs about stealing his mother's car and his father's gun, going on benders, fighting and fucking with women and has a Tom Waits sensiblity with a funky sense of melody and rythym.

Fry's a big fella who thumps away at that bass in a way I find very gratifying. Jonathan poisons young minds by teaching them Spanish, something that must irritate the rethuglicans up there in Minneapolis where he lives.

I played with these guys at the Farmer's market last Saturday for a few hours, then they asked me to take band photos.

It was fun, even if Micheal is a kettle corn hoarding kind of guy.

I even made fifteen bucks. Whoo-frakkin' hoo.

More Flower Porn

An image of what's growing at the foot of my back porch.

I like the flowers a lot, but the freaky seed pods are my favorite.

I wish I had ten times the yard, I'd have ten times the garden.

Most folks in the USA are stupid about lawns.

They water and fertilize and mow them, dumping untold tons of fertilizer and pesticides and carbon gasses into the air to have something that's a boring monoculture that they rarely sit on or play on, preferring to escape reality by playing video games or watching advertising masquerading as football.

Then they bitch about the grass growing and climb back on their fossil fueled riding mowers again, before going to a big overpriced grocery store to buy flavorless produce grown in places thousands of miles away.

When the suburbs empty out, poor folks will move in and grow gardens.

I may be one of them.

I've turned almost every single bit of my yard into flowerbeds, garden or a mix of both.

Ten gallons of salsa are in my game plan this year.

Death to lawns! Death to bad produce!

And most of all, death to the infernal combustion lawnmower!

Some straight dope for the dopes mowing!

http://www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/faq-environment.htm

Each weekend, about 54 million Americans mow their lawns, using 800 million gallons of gas per year and producing tons of air pollutants. Garden equipment engines, which have had unregulated emissions until very recently, emit high levels of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, producing up to 5% of the nation's air pollution and a good deal more in metropolitan areas.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a traditional gas powered lawn mower produces as much air pollution as 43 new cars each being driven 12,000 miles.

FACT: one hour of mowing is the equivalent of driving 350 miles in terms of volatile organic compounds.
Fact: One gas mower spews 87 lbs. of the greenhouse gas CO2, and 54 lbs. of other pollutants into the air every year.
Fact: Over 17 million gallons of gas are spilled each year refueling lawn and garden equipment – more oil than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez

Good Childcare is Hard To Find

Given a choice, I think I'd rather have a monkey than a baby.

Babies grow up to be kids, who are mean little shits who yell at each other on the playground next door, turn into fat little mammals that demand corn syrup filled junk food, and usually turn my pals into fucking idiots who obsess over things like picking out a church to take them to, even though they haven't been to one since they hated it as kids.

Or they buy a home on the west side so they can be in a better school district, even though the damn little shit spiller is only two years old.

I'm glad I poured bleach into my gene pool, decided to have milkless tits and no worry about sending them to college or having them come home one day when they finally realize what sex is and tell me they're heterosexual and are going to bible camp.

Bleech.

But enough about my hatred of the concept of kids. On to something really cool:

Today, while drinking a beer and eating some fine pizza we baked up,

we watched one of our hop plants grow two inches in an hour.

Pretty cool to see summer finally kick in with a vengance.

Airlines, Corn Syrup and Good Shoes

Even monkeys aren't stupid enough to burn their home up to make

cheap Ikea shit and grow burgers for beef on what used to be rainforest.

Maybe they would be if they had bigger brains. I hope not....

My advice of the day:

Go buy good shoes. You'll need them. Gas is going to be six bucks a gallon by the end of the year. So you'll be walking more. Or biking.
Or taking the bus, although you're not going to be taking it to anywhere in Northern Wisconsin. They don't go there anymore.

And that furnace in the basement? I suggest buying a space heater or three, because natural gas is going up too, almost as fast, and the folks who used to sell us liquefied natural gas are now selling us crude oil and burning it themselves. It may not be a big part of the gas market, but those empty LPG tankers and terminals sitting on our coasts are proof that the oil nations would rather burn it for themselves, just like the gas we have to bid on.


And by the way, at least half the gas cost increases are due to the BushCo. policies that made our dollar worth so much less. The idiots who voted for him should all go super glue their mouths shut and fingers together.

And you better get used to staying close to home. Aviation is going to go back to what it was when I was a kid. Expensive, and for the rich.
One of the major airlines just announced that they're charging 15 bucks just to check A BAG.
Not an extra bag. Just a suitcase. Imagine how fun the overhead bins will be when all the people who can barely afford to fly react to that.
Not that it will matter. The days of cheap flights are over.

Maybe we'll get trains again. Built by unemployed autoworkers. GM is laying off 24 percent of it's workforce by the end of the year, having lost 38 BILLION dollars this year.
When it gets bad enough, there will be a new New Deal. And maybe we can get something lasting built, instead of a lasting legacy of new robber barons and tax cuts for the rich.
We're driving around and living with an infrastructure that our current population is too stupid to fix by voting in better folks.


I see a return of a different lifestyle in the wind. One where taking a trip means a week on a big boat, and not one of those bloated floating buffets full of porky white people from Topeka drifting around the Caribbean eating corn syrup laced crap food and showing just how ugly cellulite is when you're twenty seven and have the body of a sixty year old glutton.

And how about that corn syrup in everything? Thanks, Herb Kohl and Tammy Baldwin, for supporting the farm bill and the ethanol madness of our stupid agricultural mining system.

Yup, that the right word. We're mining our topsoil. It takes thousands of years to create, and we're flushing it right down into the gulf of Mexico, creating a huge dead zone where all the crap we dump on our farms, lawns and streets causes huge algae blooms and kills everything that needs oxygen to breathe.
All to grow corn for soda, most of the processed food on the market, and to burn in our cars, because we just can't be bothered to live a life where we walk, plan ahead and take the bus, or figure out how to share.
Happy Friday everyone. I'm going to go stick onions and seeds in my garden, and pull weeds. At least I can tend to my little plot and tribe.

From the Wall Street Journal:

DETROIT -- General Motors Corp. said about 19,000 hourly workers have accepted buyout or early-retirement offers from the company and most will leave its payroll by July 1.
The move will cut the auto maker's U.S. hourly work force by about 24%, and it comes as GM is preparing a number of additional cost-cutting moves to be announced next week at its annual shareholder meeting. The 19,000 acceptances met the company's expectations, a person familiar with the numbers said.

$135 A Barrel oil, a chicken Tractor and my garden

This photo is of a chicken Tractor I made for my pal Skuby, a movable day time pen

for her chickens, so they can range around without being eaten by hawks or racoons or foxes or dogs. Great idea, stupid name.

I expect eggs for doing this job!

So, how about those record oil prices?

Better tune up that bike, plant that garden, think about getting some chickens and start looking at brown rice and beans as a lifestyle, folks.

Because today, Oil's at 135.00 a barrel. We could be looking at eight bucks a gallon in a year or two. Sooner if somebody cooks off few bombs in the right places, or BushCo decides to bomb Iran, something they're talking about, dreaming about and planning for.

And then there's this little bit from the Wall Street Journal, not a paper known for being run by dirty fucking hippie tree hugging fuzzy thinking SUV haters:

The world's premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.
A pessimistic supply outlook from the IEA could further rattle an oil market that already has seen crude prices rocket over $130 a barrel, double what they were a year ago. U.S. benchmark crude broke a record for the fourth day in a row, rising 3.3% Wednesday to close at $133.17 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
For several years, the IEA has predicted that supplies of crude and other liquid fuels will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day currently. Now, the agency is worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to surpass 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

Dirty Fingernails

It's been pointed out to me that it's been a month or more since I blogged.

That I should start up again.

So here's a poem I like by Emily Dickinson.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog

And a totally unrealted photo of a monkey.

I haven't been blogging because I have been sinking my fingers into dirt, breaking ground with shovels and forks and planting my garden with 34 tomatoes, Swiss chard, onions, beets, marigolds, Castor beans, pole beans, grapes, lettuce, spinach, basil, cilantro, snow peas, calendula, sunflowers both giant and dwarf and dahlias and lilies and fennel and hops and garlic and cabbage. And a few things I don't recall right now.

I also haven't been blogging because I read too much. I've been watching things fall apart in our economy, our climate and our culture. I've been thinking about how global climate change denial is growing, how we ignore our government torturing and drugging and deporting and imprisoning people, how our unsustainable ways are burning up resources, and also thinking about what an ugly freak show our media and the folks who lap it up are making out of the presidential race.

And I am sick onto the point of insanity of the way the Bush administration seems to waltz right over the top of the thin ice we're on.

So rather than harp on the ugly, I took time to think about these things.

And then I decided my new lifestyle is going to be preaching and practicing gardening, biking and spitting in the face of it all by growing as much of my own food as my little back yard can make, and learning to use this monkey brain of mine to spit in the face of borrowed trouble and try and enjoy the wild ride ahead.

Now's all we have to work with. I keep forgetting that And now's enough.

Our Imagined Economy

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/08/our_imagined_economy/
We say, "There’s something wrong with the economy," rather than, "I’m getting screwed by the oil companies, the banks, and my employer." Things get mystified and depersonalized. We say there’s a "recession," as if were some sort of bad weather, rather than pointing our fingers at the people who brought it down on us and who are, for the most part, profiting still. Maybe, instead of talking about "the economy" and "the recession" we should be talking about the ongoing looting and concerted attack on our standard of living --which will likely end only when there’s nothing left to squeeze out of us.
This isn’t just semantics. If there’s something wrong with "the economy," we call in the economists, we think about intervention by the Fed, and things on that level. But if someone is actually attacking us, we’re more likely to focus on how we can start working for change right now, with whatever tools are at hand.

Barbara Ehrenreich, at TMP cafe.

I've liked her writing for a long time, and she nails something vital with this post.
I enjoyed reading Nickel and Dimed, even though her writing about being a house cleaner and broke was very different than my experience of being one in Seattle at the same time, and a little melodramatic by comparison.
We're being steadily screwed by big media and big lobbies and big scumbags in congress.
But since it's going to rain for the next three days, I think I'll drink a beer and eat some eggrolls and not think about how frelled up things are.

How It Feels To Be Broken and In Shock

The first thing that you realize is that the world is spinning, and everything seems drained of color and looks like you're seeing it through a freaky wide angle lens. You don't know what the hell happened, but you remember racing your horse down the trail with your pal.
Then you start to notice things. You hear somebody screaming, and start to feel your body coming back on line, like a computer rebooting.
Then you realize that you're the one screaming, and the animal part of your body is really freaking.
You slowly start to feel the dull throb of broken bones, and you realize your back feels like it's got the worst kink in it, ever.
But when you try to get up, you realize that your right wrist is throbbing something terrible, pulsing like a fire hose being stomped on by godzilla at the same rate your heart is pumping.
Then you find yourself being lifted up by people you didn't realize were there, and you start to reel your brain back into your head from the place where it was floating three feet or so above.
And then you start realizing how much pain you're in.
You look over at your left arm, and think, whoa, that looks wrong, and say
"I think I broke both of my arms".
Right about that time the people helping you realize that there's no way to get a vehicle back to where you fell of that damn horse, and that you'll have to be taken across the lake in the boat.
As you are helped into the boat, you see that the bone in your left arm is snapped clean across, and that it's pushing the skin out to the side.
It's a clean break, not poking through the skin or splintered, and the shock you are in helps keep the reality notched down as you sit there in the boat supported by two people you know but can't remember being there afterwards.
As the boat pounds across the lake, you start to realize that your knee is throbbing like hell, and starting to swell up to about twice it's normal size.
Every whack of the boat on the waves sends a jolt up your spine, and as your arms move up and down, you start to feel an amazing amount of pain.
So much it seems surreal, like a new kind of sensation.
Once you're across the lake and down by the dock, somebody pulls up with the big Oldsmobile your dad loved to drive, and they help you into the back seat.
It's not as rough a ride as the boat, but that doesn't matter, because every mile up to the hospital makes you more aware of just how messed up you are.
At the first hospital, a tiny little place in the deep northwoods, they look at you and figure out that you need a real orhtopedic surgeon right way.
So they stick a big needle in your ass filled with demerol, and suddenly you're in half as much pain, but still hurting like you didn't think you could
Then they load you into the back of a station wagon, and all the way down the road for another 36 miles of rough backroads you cry and wimper and moan with each bump.
By the time you get to the second hospital, the surgeon's already there waiting, and he takes one look at you and orders up another shot of painkillers.
That second shot is pure, undiluted bliss. All the pain goes away, but unlike recreational opiate use, you don't feel stoned out, just an absence of pain and a surreal detatchment.
The doctor takes your left hand in his hands and pulls. The bone pops back into place, and your hands look almost right again to you. Not that it matters at that point. With that much dope in your system they could cut your head off and you would just smile as they did it.
You wake up the next day with an incrdibly sore ass from the needles full of painkiller, two broken wrists, a compressed pair of back fractures and a well bashed knee.
While you were out they drilled two holes all the way through your thumbs and stuck surgical steel pins through them, then anchored them into big plaster casts. For the next eight weeks, you try to figure out how to wipe your ass, drive your stick shift volkswagon bus and live without bending or twisting anything below your elbows but your fingers.
That's what it feels like to be in deep shock after falling off your damn horse.
And I'd still be riding them if I lived somewhere I could both keep and afford them.

Rajani, Future Supermodel

Babies and toddlers are fine to look upon, but a future supermodel like

Rajani makes me happy for the future of humanity.

Young and Stupid Thugs In My Hood

So, it's one thirty AM and I'm deep into one of those sleep cycles where you're about as far from awake as you can get, and I hear a thumping and a ringing doorbell.

I claw my way up to being nearly upright and realize that it's not a dream, and somebody's banging on the front door.

Not having a lot of faith in human kind, I got Kori to get up and follow me down to the front door, if just to have my back if it's somebody with bad intent. It was the cops!

There were two squads outside my front door and a yellow cab. And at the door was a cop with a big ass flashlight. His first question was "are there any kids in the house", then he told us that four kids had called a cab using our address, then waited in the dark beside the house for the cab driver.

When that cabbie pulled up, they jumped him, took his money and knocked him around some.

I saw little of it in the paper or on the news, besides a brief one paragraph story saying they caught the kids who did it.

It's fuckin' creepy to think there are little thugs lurking in my side yard at one Am waiting to rob people.

And to add to the creepifying factor making me wonder about my neighborhood, I found a crack pipe buried in my compost pile last weekend.

It had been there a while, but I suspect my neighbors in the house behind my shop have some rough folks visiting on a regular basis.

Add in last week's murder downtown and it seems Madison is becoming a little more scary than I thought it was.

I hate to do it, but I'm going to put in motion sensor lights on the side of the house and add a gate up by the front porch. And I'm going to keep a baseball bat next to the bed in case the mayhem starts walking into our house.

I think it's all part of the BushCo economy, where it's easier to rob a cab driver or rip shit off from your neighbors than to find a job. After all, respectable people have enough money to live in gated communities.

Peter and Kate

My former drummer Peter and my lovely roomate Kate.

I enjoy these handsome young folks. Peter's eyes are quite fetchingly large, and Kate's angular features are quite the joy to look upon.

It is indeed a wonderful thing to look upon.

I shoveled stinking compost all afternoon.

I like dirt.

That is all.

Where "the centre cannot hold" Came From

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

I've loved that poem for years. I've read or heard people say "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" fairly often, and wonder how many people realize it's from an old classic poem.

Time for a bike ride, to watch spring blossom out and see the last of the snowbanks melt away into salty, gritty, sand covered piles left to remind us of how many teeth winter still has in this age of climate wierdness.

And here's a photo of red clover in bloom that my pal Clint sent me from his shack outside Nashville to cheer me up in the slush of my discontent, and a second photo from my brother of two albino deer shot near my mother's house in Northern Wisconsin.

Nice to know as fucked up as things seem right now, some parts of nature just keep rolling along.

Nancy Spanks the Military for Tammy

From ThinkProgress.org:

Pelosi intervenes to get Rep. Baldwin’s domestic partner on military flight.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was recently “forced to intervene with Defense Secretary Robert Gates” in order to get Rep. Tammy Baldwin’s (D-WI) “domestic partner on a military flight for a congressional fact-finding trip to Europe.” While House rules allow spouses to travel with members of Congress on such missions, “military officials were apparently unwilling to consider” Baldwin’s partner “a ’spouse’ within the meaning of the House guidelines.” Pelosi’s effort was successful, but the Politico reports that “[t]he Pentagon appears to be self-conscious about transporting gay domestic partners at a time when it continues to enforce a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in its own ranks.” Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), another openly gay lawmaker, suggested the military is perhaps “following orders” because “the [Bush] administration disapproves of same-sex marriage.”